Surely you don’t really mean yes to ‘all of it’? Well, yes, I do mean that, actually. I find it very hard and I often slip up but I do endeavour to say ‘yes’ to all of it, and I am inviting you to consider whether this might be something for you to do too.
But before you explode with anger at the apparent absurdity of what I am saying let me just clarify this a bit. When I say, ‘Yes’ I do not mean ‘evaluate positively’. I do not mean that I practice looking around me and thinking ‘Wonderful! This is all exactly as I would wish it to be. There’s no room for improvement, no need to exert myself. I’m just going to sit back and savour the perfection of it all.’ That would be pretty crazy, right? The ice caps are melting. There are conflicts raging around the world. Evidence is pointing to our dominant economic model being unsustainable and yet, collectively, we appear to be sticking our heads in the sand and carrying on, full steam ahead! And to cap it all, there’s the galling fact that I do not have an answer to the question, ‘How do I get my son to revise for his GCSE exams?’ or the equally vexing question, ‘How do I get my dog, Pickle, to stop running after female dogs when they’re on heat?’
If I were an all powerful God, starting from scratch, designing the best possible of all worlds, I am not at all sure that I would make it look like this. And yet I do think there is wisdom in saying ‘yes’ to all of it. So, what does that ‘yes’ mean? Quite simply, it means that, unless we want to choose to bury our heads in the sand as to the nature of reality, we have to accept, to say ‘yes’, to the undeniable fact that right now, at this unique, unrepeatable and irreversible moment in time and space – unique in the sense that every moment is unique that, as the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus famously put it (roughly) ‘we never step in the same river twice’ – things are exactly as they are. So far so uncontroversial. But there’s more than that to say ‘yes’ to. The things that are right now the case, which is absolutely everything, could, right now, not be any other way. We need to say ‘yes’ to that as well. It is tempting, I grant you, to tease ourselves with the thought of imaginary forks in the road of the past where we could have taken a different path but if we were actually able to revisit that moment – which, just to remind you, we can’t, because we can’t ‘step in the same river twice’ – but if we could – like God – see everything that had led up to that moment and made it what it was, we would find that our individual and collective learning histories meant that we were always going pick ‘y’ and not ‘z’. This seems intolerable! As my new friend Fergus recently pointed out, ‘But, Jacob, that means giving up on the idea of free will, and that’s not very attractive’. It is a very good point! And Fergus is quite right. If, by ‘free will’, we mean a mysterious entity inside us that enables us to make choices which are, magically, unconstrained by our immediate context and learning history, then saying ‘yes’ to all of it, does involve giving up belief in that. For now, I am inviting you to notice what is showing up for you in response to all of that. If, like my friend Fergus, you find your mind is protesting against the thought of giving up the belief in free will, so defined, then say ‘yes’ to that, to the experience of a mind protesting. It is what is happening in this moment. It could not be otherwise. Your context and learning history inevitably makes it so. And, the extent to which you find you are, in this moment, able or unable to take up this invitation to notice, rather then simply identify with, your response to my words is the inevitable result of the sum total of your interactions with your context up until this moment as well.
But is this really such a terrible thing? Let’s back up a bit and look at animals who, according to many religious traditions, are different from humans in that they do not possess ‘free will’.
When we observe animals ‘learning’, it is clear that their increasing competence at navigating their environment is acquired as the organism that they are reacts and adapts to their context. Thanks to their genetic inheritance, they have bodies that fairly automatically know to seek food, sex and shelter, but they only learn how to do this in the particular bit of world that they have been born into by interacting with it, by taking the opportunities it affords to learn. These learning opportunities are not something that the animal creates out of nothing, they are simply what their environment affords, what comes their way. With each adaptation, each bit of learning, the way in which the organism reacts to the world changes in small and subtle ways; that is to say, the number of different things they can do in response to any given situation increases. Because the organism is constantly reacting and adapting to things, the things they are reacting to – even the things they have encountered before – are always presenting new learning opportunities. You can’t eat a tasty red mushroom for the first time twice. Once you eat one, you are an experienced tasty red mushroom eater, and the next tasty red mushroom you eat will be something new; it will be the second tasty red mushroom you have eaten, the time of day and location will be different, perhaps the second tasty red mushroom will provide an opportunity to notice an aspect of flavour that you had not noticed the first time round and that you will know to look out for when you come to eat tasty red mushroom number three. Just like us, animals do not, cannot, step in the same river twice. But nowhere is there a moment where the organism stops reacting to its environment in the context of its expanding learning history and starts to ‘choose’, to exercise a magical thing called ‘free-will’ in a way that is somehow unconstrained by the limits imposed by its body, its learning history and the immediate context . It’s difficult to argue that the same is not true for human beings. What is the point at which we move from merely reacting to starting ‘really’ to chose? From this perspective, there is no point when this happens, but what does happen is that, as we learn, our behavioural repertoire grows in breadth and flexibility, there are more and more things we can do in any given moment and our reactions become progressively more subtle, and more fine-tuned. We find more and more different types of mushrooms to chow down on, and our capacity for appreciation of different nuances of flavour from one mushroom to the next becomes more and more refined. The broader and more flexible our repertoire becomes, the more free we feel.
At this point you may want to say something like, ‘So you are saying that we are not ‘really’ free but that we might ‘feel free’?’ If that what is showing up for you it is because, from my perspective, you are still trapped within the binaries of a mistaken belief in an unobservable phenomenon called ‘free will’. If this particular definition of freedom is basically mistaken then its implied opposite is mistaken as well. Giving up this idea of free will does not mean giving up on freedom. From the perspective that I am espousing, we were never free in this way in the first place, so if you can give up the idea, you are liberating yourself from an illusion, and opening up the potential for a new way of being free. Saying ‘yes’ to all of it basically means letting go of the fantasy of free will and instead trusting in our innate capacity to learn, opening to each new moment, even the difficult ones, as a potential opportunity for new learning, a moment in which we can acquire a new way of responding to the world, a moment in which we become more free. From this perspective, this experience of freedom is what freedom ‘really’ is.
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Yes To All Of It 